I've communicated with autonomous driving and space people - both online in and in real life - and they all had a kind of reverence for Musk. I don't think they were dumb people - space engineers! - but they had reverence for the guy with the money who funded their activities. They couldn't just be grateful that some rich guy was throwing money at them, they had to buy into the idea that was a brilliant visionary.
To some degree it makes the "who is the scammer, who is being scammed" question, or "who is or isn't a true cult believer" question kind of irrelevant. It's a bit "you are who you pretend to be" and a bit just that it's human nature to buy into whatever you're participating in, and when someone's throwing hundreds of millions of dollars around, who doesn't want to participate?
